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Bean Soup

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Its a dreary, rainy, all day here in Ottawa. Hearty soup is just the thing to warm a body from the inside out. The trick with soup is adding enough fat, and giving the flavours the leisure time to blend together.

These 3 recipes can be made in a crockpot the day of feast. Soup is also a super easy campfire recipe.

You can make your own broth using veggies or beef bones. I like the flavour of the beef marrow more than any package broth. If you are using marrow bones for the broth omit the butter because marrow is fatty enough.

Galen’s recipe should be used with fava beans, or possibly chickpeas. Rumpolt in 1581 probably had access to a wide range of new world beans to flavour his soup.

3rd Century: Bean Soup

“Another preparation in the style of Treviso. Put boiled beans, shelled, to cook with salted meat, and with pepper and saffron.” Galen (AD 129 – 216)

Ingredients

1 cup of salted pork belly (or fat back), coarsely chopped

1 can (19 oz) fava beans

Pepper to taste

1 pinch of saffron

Salt to taste

Directions

Heat soup pot on medium high, add pork when pot is hot and lightly brown the pieces of meat.

Cover the pork with 4 cups of water.

Add rest of ingredients, bring to boil and then reduce to simmer for 30 minutes.

Serve hot.

16th Century: Simple Ginger & Bean Soup

Roman beans you can prepare on a meat day/ shells included with a beef broth/ ginger and butter. But if it is on a fast day/so cook it with peabroth/ pepper and butter so they become lovely and good. “ Marx Rumpolt, 1581

Ingredients

4 cups beef broth (or veggie broth)

2 cans of beans (19 oz. each), drained and rinsed

1 teaspoon fresh ginger

2 teaspoon butter (or marrow)

Salt to taste

Directions

Heat soup pot on medium high. Put all ingredients in pot, stir.

Bring to boil and then reduce to simmer. Simmer soup for 20 minutes.

Serve hot.

16 Century: Beans season with bacon and herbs

“Beans cooked with beef broth and bacon/ that is cut small also with green well tasting herbs/ that are chopped small.” Marx Rumpolt, 1581